Best Way to externalize system properties on a multi-environment application

We are working with a Spring 3 application that runs on several environments (test, UAT and Production) these environments are managed by a third party company so we have almost no access to the servers.

We have tried with Jboss System Properties and Maven2 Profiles. Both solutions worked fine, however we don't want to tie the application to one specific Server (Jboss 开发者_运维百科in this case) and we don't want to do environment specific builds (required for Maven2 profiles).

Is there a good way we could have environment specific properties for the app that do not require different builds for each environment and require no modifications on the server side and that could also run on different servers? (some sort of PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer that could read property files outside the app context should do the trick)

Environment-specific builds are not a bad option.

But spring 3.1 is providing what you are looking for - environment specific configuration. See this and this